If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

Nearly a Quarter Million PCs Turned Into 'Zombies'

The poll of countries who show the most infected is rather interesting....China I can believe,but the US second???

I am sure the ratio of PC user's is greater in both countries, but well, it is a sore point....

What does this say about home users and their PC's......don't care???

New research indicates that more than 200,000 computers were commandeered and turned into "zombies" each day last month, and that the amount of virus messaging on the Internet Get Linux or Windows Managed Hosting Services with Industry Leading Fanatical Support. has increased by 50 percent during the last two months.

Experts tell TechNewsWorld that over the last six months, CipherTrust's "global threat correlation engine" had been identifying an average of 170,000 new infected zombie computers each day.

I find thouse numbers quite scary. I would think the owners isp would shut down their accounts when this type of activity was detected...
All though if zombie tracking caught on like war driving did, I could have a new hobby...

If these are home systems, I doubt very much they get the attention required to get cleaned up. That is the problem.

Actually, this is the *symptom* of the problem. ISPs need to do more about down stream providers who use their pipe to distribute this crap and of course use the same pipe to carry out whatever payload exists in the malware.

Sadly, there are huge companies such as Yahoo who still have open redirects (I caught one the other day) which allow scumbags to redirect to a malware site using a format such as this:

So there are layers of issues here far greater than some poor sap clicking on a bad link. Again, the biggest being that many ISPs don't respond in a responsible fashion to these problems.

I find thouse numbers quite scary. I would think the owners isp would shut down their accounts when this type of activity was detected...

You'd think this would be the behavior but it isn't. This would make the task of remediation *much* too expensive. Instead, the C&C (command and control) are typically targeted by contacting the network operator for the particular ASN the C&C resides on.

The numbers in the report support what I see each day. I've seen botnets 500,000 strong in mid 05. I don't expect this number to shrink and I expect the numbers to skew in reports such as this when encryption and trusted paths are leveraged in these types of attacks.

--TH13

Our scars have the power to remind us that our past was real. -- Hannibal Lecter.
Talent is God given. Be humble. Fame is man-given. Be grateful. Conceit is self-given. Be careful. -- John Wooden

Mark you're forgetting about all the viruses brought back by holiday makers from Spain

What does this say about home users and their PC's......don't care???

Bingo, get that man a fish. As long as the machine boots within 15 minutes and still downloads music and pr0n it's not broken. + they can't have a virus they've got the copy of Nortron 2000 they got from their mate installed.

It is not a matter of not caring.

The majority of computers that I "fix" that have been exploited are from people who still use dial-up. And the reason their computers are not patched? It takes them [gloworange]forever[/gloworange] to download the patches. My clients with high speed connections have been educated enough and can do automatic updates with out a problem. Dial-up? Just staying connected to obtain the complete fix can be challenging enough.

I believe most software companies are a bit arrogant. Produce software, indemnify themselves with the EULA, then make it so that you need to expend resources for protection. If that is not a racket, what is?

Adding insult to injury, some companies still charge you for fixing their flaws whether it be through "subscription services" or "Maint. Contracts." Let's not even talk about upgrades - "That will be fixed in the next release."

Will the major backbones do anything about zombies or botnets? Probably not because they make money by bandwidth usage.

Again the solution is left with end-user education and support. They call that job security but I think I could be a little less secure.

Epithath: What lies here beneath is just the shell, just the nut is gone.

I helped a friend of mine clean his computer a few days ago. 95% of the crap that was on there were ad program ABOUT anti-adware software. Now that's just low. They charge unreasonably much for stuff you can get for free and they sell it by mass scaring the "noobs". Seriously, I consider the people who tought of that strategy more criminal then alot of white collar (or was it blue collar, dunno) criminals.

MOST of the computers we have cleaned have been on HighSpeed (mostly Cable) and the majority are single computer families where the kids do one (or both) of the following: Turn off the Firewall to play games across the net and/or download MP3's with some form of file sharing (kazaa, morpheus, grokster, et al)

I often wonder how many parents give their children computers for their rooms ? Most parents have no concept of virus' or zombies; so how can they educate them.

ISP's just want the $$$ for each month's usage. They aren't going to babysit the users.